“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Monday, September 16, 2013

The World Perspective in War and Peace: Tolstoy’s Genius for Integrating Multiple Perspectives

Sometime
around the age of twenty, probably as I was reading James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce, I settled on the
narrative strategy I have preferred ever since. At the time, I would have
called it third-person limited omniscient, but I would learn later, in a
section of a class on nineteenth century literature devoted to Jane Austen’s Emma, that the narrative style I always
felt so compelled by was referred to more specifically by literary scholars as
free indirect discourse. Regardless of the label, I had already been unconsciously
emulating the style for some time by then in my own short stories. Some years
later, I became quite fond of the reviews and essays of the literary critic
James Wood, partly because he eschewed all the idiotic and downright fraudulent
nonsense associated with postmodern pseudo-theories, but partly too because in his book How Fiction Works he both
celebrated and expounded at length upon that same storytelling strategy that I
found to be the most effective in pulling me into the dramas of fictional
characters.

Free
indirect discourse (or free indirect style, as it’s sometimes called) blends
first-person with third-person narration, so that even when descriptions aren’t
tagged by the author as belonging to the central character we readers can still
assume what is being attended to and how it’s being rendered in words are
revealing something of that character’s mind. In other words, the author takes
the liberty of moving in and out of the character’s mind, detailing thoughts,
actions, and outside conditions or events in whatever way most effectively
represents—and even simulates—the drama of the story. It’s a tricky thing to
master, demanding a sense of proportion and timing, a precise feeling for the
key intersecting points of character and plot. And it has a limitation: you
really can’t follow more than one character at a time, because doing so would upset
the tone and pacing of the story, or else it would expose the shallowness of
the author’s penetration. Jumping from one mind to another makes the details
seem not so much like a manifestation of the characters’ psyche as a simple
byproduct of the author’s writing habits.

Fiction
writers get around this limitation in a number of ways. Some break their
stories into sections or chapters and give each one over to a different
character. You have to be really good to pull this off successfully; it usually
still ends up lending an air of shallowness to the story. Most really great
works rendered in free indirect discourse—Herzog,
Sabbath’s Theater, Mantel’s Cromwell
novels—stick to just one character throughout, and, since the strategy calls
for an intensely thorough imagining of the character, the authors tend to stick
to protagonists who are somewhat similar to themselves. John Updike, whose
linguistic talents were prodigious enough to set him apart even in an era of
great literary masters, barely even attempted to bend his language to his
characters, and so his best works, like those in the Rabbit series, featured
characters who are at least a bit like Updike himself.

But
what if an author could so thoroughly imagine an entire cast of characters and
have such a keen sense of every scene’s key dramatic points that she could
incorporate their several perspectives without turning every page into a noisy
and chaotic muddle? What if the trick could be pulled off with such perfect
timing and proportion that readers’ attention would wash over the scene, from
character to character spanning all the objects and accidents in between, without
being thrown into confusion and without any attention being drawn to the
presence of the author? Not many authors try it—it’s usually a mark of
inexperience or lack of talent—but Leo Tolstoy somehow managed to master it.

War and Peaceis the quintessentially
huge and intimidating novel—more of a punch line to jokes about pretentious
literature geeks than a great masterwork everyone feels obliged to read at some
point in her life. But, as often occurs when I begin reading one of the
classics, I was surprised to discover not just how unimposing it is
page-by-page but how immersed in the story I became by the end of the first few
chapters. My general complaint about novels from the nineteenth century is that
the authors wrote from too great a distance from their characters, in prose
that’s too formal and wooden. It’s impossible to tell if the lightness of touch
in War in Peace, as I’m reading it,
is more Tolstoy’s or more the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky’s, but the original author’s handling of perspective is what shines
through most spectacularly.

I’m
only as far into the novel as the beginning of volume II (a little past page
300 of over 1200 pages), but much of Tolstoy’s mastery is already on fine
display. The following long paragraph features the tragically plain Princess
Marya, who for financial reasons is being presented to the handsome Prince Anatole
as a candidate for a mutually advantageous marriage. Marya’s pregnant
sister-in-law, Liza, referred to as “the little princess” and described as
having a tiny mustache on her too-short upper lip, has just been trying, with the
help of the pretty French servant Mademoiselle Bourienne, to make her look as
comely as possible for her meeting with the young prince and his father
Vassily. But Marya has become frustrated with her own appearance, and, aside
from her done-up hair, has decided to present herself as she normally is. The
scene begins after the two men have arrived and Marya enters the room.

When
Princess Marya came in, Prince Vassily and his son were already in the drawing
room, talking with the little princess and Mlle Bourienne. When she came in
with her heavy step, planting her heels, the men and Mlle Bourienne rose, and
the little princess, pointing to her said, “Voila
Marie!” Princess Marya saw them all, and saw them in detail. She saw the
face of Prince Vassily, momentarily freezing in a serious expression at the
sight of the princess, and the face of the little princess, curiously reading
on the faces of the guests the impression Marie made. She also saw Mlle
Bourienne with her ribbon, and her beautiful face, and her gaze—lively as never
before—directed at him; but she could
not see him, she saw only something
big, bright, and beautiful, which moved towards her as she came into the room. Prince
Vassily went up to her first, and she kissed the bald head that bowed over her
hand, and to his words replied that, on the contrary, she remembered him very
well. Then Anatole came up to her. She still did not see him. She only felt a
gentle hand firmly take hold of her hand, and barely touched the white forehead
with beautiful, pomaded blond hair above it. When she looked at him, his beauty
struck her. Anatole, the thumb of his right hand placed behind a fastened
button of his uniform, chest thrust out, shoulders back, swinging his free leg
slightly, and inclining his head a little, gazed silently and cheerfully at the
princess, obviously without thinking of her at all. Anatole was not
resourceful, not quick and eloquent in conversation, but he had instead a
capacity, precious in society, for composure and unalterable assurance. When an
insecure man is silent at first acquaintance and shows an awareness of the
impropriety of this silence and a wish to find something to say, it comes out
badly; but Anatole was silent, swung his leg, and cheerfully observed the
princess’s hairstyle. It was clear that he could calmly remain silent like that
for a very long time. “If anyone feels awkward because of this silence, speak
up, but I don’t care to,” his look seemed to say. Besides that, in Anatole’s
behavior with women there was a manner which more than any other awakens women’s
curiosity, fear, and even love—a manner of contemptuous awareness of his own
superiority. As if he were saying to them with his look: “I know you, I know,
but why should I bother with you? And you’d be glad if I did!” Perhaps he did
not think that when he met women (and it is even probable that he did not,
because he generally thought little), but such was his look and manner. The
princess felt it, and, as if wishing to show him that she dared not even think
of interesting him, turned to the old prince. The conversation was general and
lively, thanks to the little princess’s voice and the lip with its little
mustache which kept rising up over her white teeth. She met Prince Vassily in
that jocular mode often made use of by garrulously merry people, which consists
in the fact that, between the person thus addressed and oneself, there are
supposed to exist some long-established jokes and merry, amusing reminiscences,
not known to everyone, when in fact there are no such reminiscences, as there
were none between the little princess and Prince Vassily. Prince Vassily
readily yielded to this tone; the little princess also involved Anatole, whom
she barely knew, in this reminiscence of never-existing funny incidents. Mlle
Bourienne also shared in these common reminiscences, and even Princess Marya
enjoyed feeling herself drawn into this merry reminiscence. (222-3)

In this pre-film
era, Tolstoy takes an all-seeing perspective that’s at once cinematic and
lovingly close up to his characters, suggesting the possibility that much of
the deep focus on individual minds in contemporary fiction is owing to an urge
for the one narrative art form to occupy a space left untapped by the other. Still,
as simple as Tolstoy’s incorporation of so many minds into the scope of his
story may seem as it lies neatly inscribed and eternally memorialized on the
page, a fait accompli, his uncanny
sense of where to point the camera, as it were, to achieve the most evocative
and forwardly propulsive impact in the scene is one not many writers can be counted
on to possess. Again, the pitfall lesser talents fall prey to when trying to
integrate multiple perspectives like this arises out of an inability to avoid advertising
their own presence, which entails a commensurate detraction from the
naturalness and verisimilitude of the characters. The way Tolstoy maintains his
own invisibility in those perilously well-lit spaces between his characters begins
with the graceful directness and precision of his prose but relies a great deal
as well on his customary method of characterization.

For Tolstoy,
each character’s experience is a particular instance of a much larger trend. So,
when the lens of his descriptions focuses in on a character in a particular
situation, the zooming doesn’t occur merely in the three-dimensional space of
what a camera would record but in the landscape of recognizable human
experience as well. You see this in the lines above about how "in Anatole’s behavior with women there was a manner which more than any other awakens women’s curiosity, fear, and even love," and the "jocular mode often made use of by garrulously merry people." Here is a still more illustrative example from when the Countess Rostov is reflecting on a letter from her
son Nikolai informing her that he was wounded in battle but also that he’s been
promoted to a higher rank.

How
strange, extraordinary, joyful it was that her son—that son who twenty years
ago had moved his tiny limbs barely perceptibly inside her, that son over whom
she had quarreled with the too-indulgent count, that son who had first learned
to say “brush,” and then “mamma,” that this son was now there, in a foreign
land, in foreign surroundings, a manly warrior, alone, with no help or
guidance, and doing there some manly business of his own. All the worldwide,
age-old experience showing that children grow in an imperceptible way from the
cradle to manhood, did not exist for the countess. Her son’s maturing had been
at every point as extraordinary for her as if there had not been millions upon
millions of men who had matured in just the same way. As it was hard to believe
twenty years ago that the little being who lived somewhere under her heart
would start crying, and suck her breast, and begin to talk, so now it was hard
to believe that this same being could be the strong, brave man, an example to
sons and people, that he was now, judging by his letter. (237)

There’s only a single person in
the history of the world who would have these particular feelings in response
to this particular letter, but at the same time these same feelings will be familiar—or
at least recognizable—to every last person who reads the book.

While reading War and Peace, you have the sense, not
so much that you’re being told a grand and intricate story by an engagingly
descriptive author, but that you’re witnessing snippets of countless
interconnected lives, selections from a vast historical multitude that are both
arbitrary and yet, owing to that very connectedness, significant. Tolstoy shifts
breezily between the sociological and the psychological with such finesse that
it’s only in retrospect that you realize what he’s just done. As an epigraph to
his introduction, Pevear quotes Isaac Babel: “If the world could write by
itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

The biggest drawback
to this approach (if you don’t count its reliance on ideas about universals in
human existence, which are a bit unfashionable of late) is that since there’s
no way to know how long the camera will continue to follow any given character,
or who it will be pointed at next, emotional investments in any one person have
little chance to accrue any interest. For all the forward momentum of looming
marriages and battle deaths, there’s little urgency attached to the fate of any
single individual. Indeed, there’s a pervasive air of comic inconsequence,
sometimes bordering on slapstick, in all the glorious strivings and abrupt
pratfalls. (Another pleasant surprise in store for those who tackle this
daunting book is how funny it is.) Of course, with a novel that stretches
beyond the thousand-page mark, an author has plenty of time to train readers
which characters they can expect to hear more about. Once that process begins,
it’s difficult to laugh at their disappointments and tragedies. Also read: Life's White Machine: James Wood and What Doesn't Happen in Fiction